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Americans should heed Obama’s warning on Trump: Editorial

Obama abandoned his usual professorial in his response to an existential threat facing America: Donald Trump.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump pumps his fist after speaking at a rally in Atlanta on June 15. (John Bazemore / AP)

Wed., June 15, 2016

If Barack Obama seemed a little weary as he responded to the massacre in Orlando on Sunday, he can be forgiven. It was the 15th time he had addressed the American people in the wake of a mass shooting. None of those previous tragedies convinced America’s gun-crazy Congress to curb the easy access to firearms that has allowed mass shootings to become a weekly occurrence in the United States. Nor, likely, will this one.

Trump’s despicable speech on the tragedy in Orlando required a rebuttal. A friend of the powerful National Rifle Association, the candidate did not touch on gun control in his remarks (he has since said he would talk to the NRA about keeping firearms out of the hands of “enemies of the state,” as if the government has to ask permission). He did not denounce the homophobia that seems to have prompted Omar Mateen to kill 49 people and injure many more at the Pulse nightclub. He did not call for calm or unity. Instead, he spread fear.

Trump exploited every partisan opportunity without regard for the consequences. He said Obama and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton had put political correctness over security by refusing to call Mateen’s murder spree an act of “radical Islamic terrorism.” And he reiterated his desire, immoral and impossible though it is, to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

Trump’s irresponsible embrace of divisive, often racist rhetoric isn’t just ignorant, it’s also dangerous. He says he wants the U.S. to be more militarily aggressive in fighting Daesh. But he has shown no understanding of the complexities of waging a war against a force that regularly uses civilians as human shields. He wants his country’s leaders to start calling lone-wolf attacks like the one in Orlando “Islamic terrorism.” But he seems to have no appreciation that such talk perversely conflates threats of varying kinds and degrees. Or that it plays into the hands of groups like Daesh that seek to project a war between Islam and the West as a means to radicalize and recruit.

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The president, without ever saying his target’s famous name, cut deeply into Trump’s vile reliance on divisive rhetoric. Not once had the president “not been able to pursue a strategy because we didn’t use the label ‘radical Islam’,” he said. “Not once has an adviser of mine said, ‘Man, if we really use that phrase, we’re going to turn this whole thing around.’ Not once.”

Obama’s dismantling made Trump’s fallacies look almost comical, which is why it was important that he then laid out the grave stakes: “We’ve gone through moments in our history before when we acted out of fear, and we came to regret it. We’ve seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens, and it has been a shameful part of our history.”

Here he was likely referring to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans amid the climate of fear that prevailed in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. These actions were eventually acknowledged in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 as the outcome of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” When asked about the internment last year, Trump said, “I certainly hate the concept of it.” But, he qualified, “war is tough. And winning is tough.”

Trump is asking voters to embrace their worst selves. He has made clear that a vote for him in November is a vote for fear, division and violence. Obama and others have articulated the high cost of that choice. Americans can’t say they haven’t been warned.

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